I have been thinking this week about how every year we read the same story of Jesus’ death. Unlike the Christmas story that we eagerly anticipate hearing each year, this story seems like a masochistic practice of hearing the same devastating story over and over again. And we do not just read this story on Good Friday. In addition to John’s version of the passion narrative, we read one of the synoptic versions on Palm Sunday. Twice in one week we relive the painful story, catching interesting variations. But the ending is always the same: death, finality, failure. At least on Palm Sunday, we use various voices, making the story feel like a performance. But today, one sole voice, tells the achingly raw story – a story we would rather skip, or soften, or cry out to the reader, “Please stop!”

In hearing the story this year, I was struck by the failures of three characters. The first is probably the easiest culprit: Judas. In Mathew’s gospel there is at least a feigning of loyalty as Judas greets Jesus as “Rabbi,” and kisses his cheek. But John does not play such games. In John’s narrative, Judas is fully on the side of the persecutors. He boldly brings and stands with the soldiers and police. He does not greet Jesus, or apologize. He is confident in his decision. He stands proud, even as we now are able to see his profound failure. His ignorance of the depth of his betrayal is almost worse than the actual betrayal. His confidence that this is for the best, is the first crack in our hearts as we hear this painful story.

Then we have Peter – precious, passionate, pitiful Peter. For all the times he gets things right, and all the endearing times he gets things wrong, today is just a spirit-crushing failure. In Matthew’s gospel, Peter denies knowing Jesus. In John’s gospel, Peter denies his discipleship – his very relationship with and dedication to the Messiah. In the face of Jesus’ “I am,” claim[i] today, Peter’s claim is “I am not.”[ii] For all the wonderful, powerful, sacrificial moments in Jesus today, Peter is shameful, cowardly, and self-serving. Even after being warned that he will deny Christ, Peter denies Christ in spite of himself. That cock’s crow is the second crack in our hearts as we hear this brutal story.

The third character today does not always get as much attention, but their failure is perhaps the worst. Whereas Judas and Peter deny and betray a friend, the chief priests deny their very God. They say seven words to Pilate today that should be more shocking than anything said. “We have no king but the emperor.” We often get distracted by their words, because we know that they are meant manipulate Pilate’s sense of authority. But the chief priests, the religious, moral guides of the people of faith say today, “We have no king but the emperor.” Of course, we have to think back to remember why this statement is so profoundly painful. You see, once upon a time, God was the king of Israel. The people worshiped Yahweh, and Yahweh alone. But the people got greedy, and begged Yahweh for a king like the other nations. And so God anointed kings through God’s prophets. But the chief priests take their self-centered sinfulness a step further than our ancestors. They deny God today. Their claim to have no king but the emperor is treason against our God – blasphemy. And with their claim, our heart lies cracked in two as we hear the rest of the awful story.

Of course, blaming Judas, Peter, and the chief priests would be an easy way to scapegoat our way out of this dark day. There are even Christians who claim that the Jews crucified our Lord. But we know the truth. We know that we are the Jews. We know that we are Judas and Peter and the chief priests. We know that our heart fractures with each vignette because they remind us of times when we have stood on our soapboxes, certain of our moral claims, only to later look back and see whom we betrayed and trampled in the process. We know that that our heart fractures because we are reminded of those times when we knew the right thing to do, said we were going to do the right thing, and then failed to do the right thing – over, and over, and over again. We have heard that same cock crowing. We know that our heart fractures because we have put other gods before our God. Sure, the gods have varied: money, power, security, ego. But we have gotten so lost in our gods that we said and did things that would have inspired a gasp from anyone more faithful than ourselves. The failures of Judas, Peter, and the chief priests are not just failures of those men, two thousand years ago. The failures of Judas, Peter, and the chief priests are our failures.[iii]

I think that is why we tell this story year after year, twice a week from different gospels. We tell this story over and over again because we fail over and over again. Though the specific characters are important, the characters live and operate in us centuries later. That is why the story is so compelling – not because we can gather together and wag our fingers at those people. The story is compelling because the story is eerily close to our own sinfulness. Part of the devastating nature of this story is how complicit we are in the story. Though the powers of evil might want us to deny our culpability in this story, what is hardest about this story is how close to home the story really is.

Now, you I do not ever like to leave the pulpit without a word of hope, a reminder that risen Lord redeems us all. But today, I encourage you not to rush to the empty tomb. Take time to sit in our collective confession, to tarry on those things done and left undone which are separating you from God and one another. Bring your failures or sense of failure to the cross and lay them there today. Grieve the ways that you cannot help yourself, year after year, from sin and shame. The whole season of Lent has been building up to this day. The whole reason we took on those disciplines and came to church for confession was because we knew, ultimately, that this is where we keep tripping up: in betrayal and denial of our very identity as beloved disciples and children of God. We are the ones bombing others. We are the ones racially profiling. We are the ones denigrating women, the poor, and the oppressed. We are the ones, century after century repeating the sins of the faithful.

Lay all that sinfulness at the cross today. Whether you venerate the cross in the liturgy today, wear a cross around your neck, or pray with the cross on your prayer beads, the power of the cross is to absorb all those failures and to transform them into something worth living. You can, and perhaps should, feel the powerful weight of your sinful patterns today. But let them die at the foot of the cross with Jesus. Lay them naked at the cross, for all the world to see. There is relief in that confession, the depth of which you may not feel fully until our Easter proclamation.

The older I have become, the more solid my support system has become. Over time, I have figured out in which friendships to invest my time, and which friendships, while fun, are not necessarily nourishing. I know which friend to call when I need fashion advice and which friend to call when I need major life decision advice. I have learned which friend to find when I want to be comforted, and which friend to find when I need to be discomforted. The discomforting friend is probably the most valuable one any of us has. That is the friend who will tell you the brutal, ugly, harsh truth – not to be mean to you but to save you from going down a dark path, to snap you out of a rut, or to help you get your act together. Of course, sometimes we avoid that friend like the plague because we are not ready to hear the truth. But when we feel ourselves slipping away, when we feel drawn in by temptation, or when we simply feel incapable of doing the right thing, we know we can trust that friend to hold us accountable to being the best version of ourselves – the version God created us to be.

This morning, the lectionary seems to be filled with discomforting friends. In First Kings, we hear about the ultimate showdown with the prophets of Baal and Elijah, the prophet of the Lord. The story is dramatic, with Baal’s prophets comically trying to rain down fire to prove Baal’s power, and Elijah showing them up by demonstrating the Lord’s triumph. But we quickly learn that Elijah is one of those discomforting friends when he says to the people of God, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.”[i] Desperate for rain in a three-year drought, the people of God have begun to hedge their bets. They figure they can worship both Baal and the Lord. But Elijah will not let them be so divided. Either they trust in the Lord their God, or they do not.

If Elijah sounds harsh, you should hear Paul this morning. Paul starts his letter to the Galatians with a traditional greeting, but we can tell from his lack of thanksgiving for the community, that some harsh words are about to come.[ii] After a quick introduction, Paul cuts to the chase, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel…”[iii] At the heart of the issue is whether Gentile converts must adhere to Jewish laws. The Galatians want to narrow the wideness of the gospel, while Paul wants to expand the reach of the gospel. So angry and defiant is Paul that he practically shouts, “If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”[iv] In other words, Paul has no interest in soothing feelings in Galatia. He is only interested in correcting behavior and preserving the abundance of the gospel.[v]

And if Elijah and Paul were not harsh enough this morning, Jesus rounds us out with a scathing indictment of the faithful. A centurion, a Roman solider, and sometimes enemy of the people of God, sends a message to Jesus. Despite the fact that he is not Jewish, he sends word to Jesus twice – first, asking Jesus to heal his sick slave, and second, insisting that Jesus not make the journey, but only speak a word of healing from afar. The text tells us that Jesus, who is very rarely reactive, is “amazed,” and criticizes the faithful of God by saying, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”[vi] If we think about who is gathered around Jesus, we are not just talking about some delinquent followers. Jesus says in front of disciples and everyone that none of them has had the same dedication and faith in Jesus as this outsider. Jesus has no problem being brutally honest about the people’s lack of faith and trust in Jesus.

If you were hoping for a nice, affirming set of lessons today, a time set apart with that friend who always encourages and affirms you, you picked the wrong Sunday. We might have guessed the brutal honesty was coming when we prayed our collect today. The collect says, “O God, your never-failing providence sets in order all things both in heaven and earth: Put away from us, we entreat you, all hurtful things, and give us those things which are profitable for us…”[vii] In other words, we prayed God would not be that comforting friend today – but would be the discomforting friend that we need.

Now you may be sitting here wondering what kind of discomfort I will be dishing out today. Or you may be wondering on what issue I think we need work. The good news is that I do not have such a charge today. I suspect that you already know where you need discomfort. Your discomfort may need to be from Elijah, who warns about putting idols before God – putting your trust and hope in places and things that will not satisfy. Or maybe your discomfort needs to come from Paul, who warns about putting restrictions on the wideness of God’s mercy. Or maybe your discomfort needs to come from Jesus, who can point to non-believers who seem to trust God more than you. You alone know how the Spirit is speaking to your need for discomfort.

However, even though you alone know how the Spirit is speaking to your need for discomfort, you are not alone in needing that discomfort. One of my favorite parts of our liturgy is the confession. One, I find the confession immensely centering because every week, one phrase or part of the confession jumps out at me – whether something I have done or left undone is nagging me; whether I have sinned against God or my neighbor; or whether I have just strayed that week. Even though we say the confession every week, the confession never ceases to unsettle me. Two, I find the confession comforting because of all the voices that join me in the confession. I love hearing young and old voices, male and female voices, and voices with every accent imaginable confessing the same failings that I confess. The power of that communal act is always humbling and comforting.

Now I know I told you that you should not have come to church today if you were looking for comfort. But the truth is, I find all the discomfort today wildly comforting. Whether we are pushed by our discomforting witnesses in scripture, whether we are jolted by something in our communal confession, or whether we realize that we need to call our best discomforting friend immediately after church, I find the reminder that I am not the only one who needs discomfort comforting today. I am comforted because I know after the discomfort comes, something akin to a fire is lit inside me. The discomfort is usually just what I need to reinvigorate my walk with Christ and sharply focus on where God is calling me to be. If that is not good news, I do not know what is. Amen.

I recently watched the film We Are Marshall. The film details the true story of a tragedy in 1970 that happened to Marshall University. After an away football game, most of the team and coaches, as well as several boosters, took a private plane back to the university. The plane crashed just minutes from landing, killing everyone onboard. The town was bereft as they mourned their sons, friends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, and teammates. The University’s Board was set to cancel the 1971 football season, when the few surviving players petitioned to play anyway. The president was then tasked to find a coach who would be willing to step into this tragic situation – coaching a season that many thought was inappropriate given the deaths, to find enough players when Freshmen were not yet allowed to play per NCAA rules, and to find a supporting coaching staff, including trying to recruit the only assistant coach who had not been on the plane. The season moves forward and after the first game, which Marshall loses, the head coach and the surviving assistant coach have a heart-to-heart. The assistant coach explains that the deceased former head coach had always said that the most important thing in football was winning. And if the current team was not going to win, the assistant didn’t want to coach, because they would be dishonoring the former coach’s memory. After a long pause, the current head coach confesses that before he came to Marshall, he would have said the same thing: that winning is the most important thing. But now that he was there, in the midst of the Marshall community, the most important thing to him was simply playing.

We are a society that glorifies winning. Not just in sports, but in all of life, we want to be winners. No one likes to lose because losing, when we are really honest, is not fun. Of course, we try to teach our children that we cannot always win. Many a play date argument is settled by the conversation that sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. We even have a word for being comfortable with losing. We say we are being “good sports.” But being a good sport takes work. We do not like losing. Losing itches as something deep inside of us – both internally and externally reinforced. We want to be winners.

Of course no one knows more about losing than King David. History labels him as a winner, but as we reread his story, we know that David was an intimate friend of losing. We hear the deep pain of his losing in his final words today, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” We know the pain of losing a child – the sorrow and the grief of that kind of losing. But David is not just mourning the loss of his child in these words. He is morning the loss even more deeply because he knows he is indirectly guilty of his son’s death.[i] If you remember, in the reading we heard last week, Nathan told David that because of his sinfulness with Bathsheba and Uriah that his household will be plagued by a sword. Through Nathan, the Lord proclaims, “I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this very sun. For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.”[ii]

God stays true to God’s judgment. Between last week’s reading and this week’s reading, David’s family starts to fall apart. His first child with Bathsheba dies. One of David’s sons rapes his half-sister. When David does not punish that son, another son, Absalom, takes action, killing his half-brother. Absalom then flees, and spends years amassing a revolution against David. Absalom manages to take Jerusalem, and further humiliates David by sleeping with ten of David’s concubines in front of everyone. David is forced to battle against Absalom to restore the kingdom, but he does so begrudgingly. Today we hear David trying to make victory as painless as possible, asking his men to deal gently with Absalom. But Absalom had made too many enemies in the family and kingdom, and when the time came, he was killed in battle. Though many saw Absalom’s death as a victory, David knew the truth. Victory in this case was not winning for David. Victory was just another reminder of the ways in which David’s life had become about losing – about the painful reminder of his sin hanging over his head.

David reminds us of what we have all learned about losing. Though none of us like losing, we know losing is a necessary and probably valuable part of life. You see, losing helps us in many ways. First, losing reminds us of our finitude. Though we might like to think we are without limits or we can control everything, losing reminds us of the “futility of our personal striving and the frailty of our existence.” Second, losing gives us the opportunity to reexamine our goals and outlook on life. Losing can help us see when perhaps we have become overly self-serving, have developed unrealistic expectations, or we have just become distracted by the wrong things in life. Finally, losing reminds us that our lives are in need of redemption. Losing can give us a much-needed opportunity to renew our relationship with God. As one scholar explains, “In this moment of realization, we are liberated to renew our trust in God’s power and in [God’s] purpose for our lives.” That does not mean we should give up, stop trying, or be overcome by the fear of losing. Instead, maintaining our trust in God gives assurance that “ultimately, there is no losing without the possibility of redemption.”[iii]

Think for a moment about the ultimate symbol of our faith – the cross. The cross is both a symbol of loss and victory. We always remember the victory of resurrection and redemption, but first, the cross was a symbol of death and defeat. The cross was a humiliating reminder of the brutal death of the one we insist is the Messiah. Our main symbol was the symbol of ultimate loss – the place where losers go to lose: lose their life, their dignity, and their power. That symbol of being a loser is only redeemed because the Redeemer redeems it. Of course, we should not be surprised. Every week, we as a community gather and remind ourselves at how we are losers when we confess our sins. We kneel down and young, old, male, female, single, partnered, good, and bad confess that we lost. Every single week we confess how, once again, we have lost.

I sometimes wonder how David coped with the sword in his house. Sure, he had moments of redemption. Solomon taking the helm at David’s death was one of the best redemptive moves in his family. But I wonder, on that deathbed, how all the losing in David’s life weighed on him. In last week’s lesson, David did what all of us do. He confessed. He confessed, “I have sinned against the Lord.” His confession did not make Absalom’s death any less painful. But his confession, like ours, is redemptive. Like David, when we acknowledge and confess our senses of incompleteness, “we are able to be freed from the entrapments of a win/lose culture. God accepts us despite our failings. This relationship is not earned; [this relationship] is a divine gift. Accepted and forgiven, we are liberated to celebrate life. Affirmed and fulfilled by God, we are released to care for others. These affirmations point to the redemptive side of failure, to the God who accepts losers.”[iv]

When we wear a cross, or we reverence the cross in church, we reverence both the winning and the losing of the cross. We honor the ways in which the cross represents not just the loss of Christ, but also the brokenness in each of us – the ways in which we have failed. Only when we honor that loss can we then hold that cross as a symbol of victory. That cross becomes a symbol of the ways in which Christ redeems us, but also the ways in which we too made new through our losing. When we embrace the cross in its fullness of expression, we also recognize the fullness of our lives – the good, the bad, and the ugly. We know that without the embracing of our losing we can never fully claim the victory of our winning through the cross. Amen.

Today we are going to do something a little different. I want you to grab a partner – maybe someone sitting beside you or someone sitting in the row in front of or behind you, and I want you to look at the tags in your shirts or dresses to see where they are made. And when you are done, I want you to shout out the locations.

One of my favorite musical groups, Sweet Honey in the Rock, is an a cappella women’s group that sings spiritual and political songs. One of their songs is called “Are My Hands Clean?”[i] Here are the words:

I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world; 35% cotton, 65% polyester, the journey begins in Central America; In the cotton fields of El Salvador; In a province soaked in blood, Pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun; Pulling cotton for two dollars a day.

Then we move on up to another rung—Cargill; A top-forty trading conglomerate, takes the cotton through the Panama Canal; Up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the US of A for the first time; In South Carolina; At the Burlington mills; Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of; Dupont.

Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela; Where oil riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day; Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world; Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago; Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas; To the factories of Dupont; On the way to the Burlington mills; In South Carolina; To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador.

In South Carolina; Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric; for Sears; Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea; Headed for Haiti this time—May she be one day soon free—; Far from the Port-au-Prince palace; Third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications; For three dollars a day my sisters make my blouse.

It leaves the third world for the last time; Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me; This third world sister; And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse; On sale for 20% discount.

The point of the song and the point of us thinking about where our clothes come from is that there is a lot more to our everyday living than we can ever imagine. My shirt being made in Guatemala or the Dominican Republic is just a small piece of the story. Many hands touch that shirt before I ever purchase the shirt – in fact, even the hands that sell me the shirt have a story. Somewhere, and some times multiple somewheres, along the way our garments are a part of a bigger story – one that regularly involves injustice, oppression, and poverty. And through our participation in the process, we become a part of that system of sin.

I remember when I worked for a non-profit that advocated for the people of Guatemala, a story had come out about the Gap and how they were using manufacturers that were what we would call “sweat shops.” I remember telling my boss that I was thinking of no longer shopping at the Gap, and he asked me why? I thought my reason would be obvious, but before I could elaborate, he explained that almost every clothing manufacturer was touched by the sinful industry of oppression and injustice. And if not our clothes, then our food or personal care products could also be perpetrators. The idea of boycotting one company was pointless to him because a boycott could only make the smallest of dents in an unjust world.

The despair that he created for me that day was like the despair that Paul has in our lesson from Romans today. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” I know his words are a bit convoluted, but basically, Paul is articulating how hard doing the right thing is – even when we know the right thing to do, we cannot seem to do the right thing. And that is assuming we know the right thing to do in the first place!

So what are we supposed to do in this messy world of sin, with our sinful participation in that world? Well, the church invites us to confess. Every week after we pray, before we partake of the holy, cleansing meal, we confess our sins – known and even those unknown to us (like those injustices caused by simply putting on a shirt today). And we confess aloud together – so that we know that Mrs. Edith sins, just like Hunter sins, and just like I sin. And we even admit together that not just our words and deeds are sinful – sometimes our thoughts are sinful too. We admit that even though we bit our tongues this week, the sinful thought was still there, letting evil creep into our lives.

But after the confession, an incredible thing happens. We are forgiven. We are forgiven again, for the millionth time, and invited to the table as a reconciled community. We are fed together, having fully acknowledged our sinfulness, and recognizing how we all have work to do. Finally, we are sent out into the world: to try a little better this week, to care a little more, to long for justice a little more, and to keep trying to seek and serve Christ in all persons. Our worship and scripture tell us, “no,” our hands are not clean. But we are blessed by the God who saves us, and we go forth into the world to keep trying. Amen.

I got a little behind posting my homilies from our Thursday Eucharists. The next few entries will catch us up!

Today we honor the Confession of St. Peter the Apostle: that moment when Peter declares that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. Peter is one of my favorite characters in the New Testament, mostly because he is always messing up. He is the rock on which Jesus will build his Church – he even renamed Peter for this reason. But Peter is always messing up, sinking in the sea, offering to build tabernacles at the Transfiguration, and denying Jesus Christ three times.

I don’t love that Peter messes up because I am superior to Peter. I love that Peter messes up because I mess up so much too. I am always doubting God. I am always misunderstanding what God is doing. I am always denying my Lord – in small and big ways. Somehow, if Peter can do all these things and still be loved by Jesus, maybe there is hope for me. What I love about today’s feast day, though, is that today celebrates a day when Peter gets it right – no beating up Peter; no making excuses. Today is a day that Peter gets it, and we the church rejoice.

What is even more redeeming to me is that Jesus declares how Peter achieves this moment of clarity. “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father in heaven.” Peter does not achieve this clarity or earn it or do it on his own – only through God can he be this clear-headed rock of the Church, declaring, “You are the Messiah.”

This is how we, too, follow the life of Christ and our call in that life. Only through God, who alone can make us all clear-headed, impassioned lovers of Jesus Christ. We will continue to mess up, just like Peter, but we will have our moments. Moments we make God proud, maybe even moments that make the church want to celebrate these proud moments. Because not only do we celebrate our victories, we celebrate the One who makes those victories possible. Amen.